The Perils of Using Shakespeare as a Screenplay

Joss Whedon’s film “Much Ado About Nothing” might as well have been the “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” of Shakespeare movies. Rather than bothering to film his cast and crew on location, he could have taken a season of “Gossip Girl” or “Pretty Little Liars” and dubbed in performances of Shakespeare’s lines with the same overemphatic, fake-conversational inflections used by the actors on those shows. The faux-naturel gesture repertory of those programs is the same as the one that Whedon imparts to his Shakespearean actors, and his representational and impatient filming, which keeps the eye hopping while the dialogue is rattled off, is the same, as is the blandly underlining music.

There isn’t an image in Whedon’s “Much Ado” (with its uselessly silky black-and-white palette) that’s up to any line in the play—not as inflected, not as clear, not as freely expressive, not as original, not as spontaneous. The entire movie is a “like”: Whedon likes Shakespeare, and offers about as much of a point of view on the play as would a Facebook nod. I’m not suggesting that Whedon isn’t up to doing Shakespeare and should stick with cartoon fantasies. On the contrary, I have no doubt that he can do something intriguing with it, if only he’d let himself go with Shakespeare’s world as freely and uninhibitedly as he does with Marvel’s. When he directs “The Avengers,” he has a point of view, and he dares to confront the material and make it reflect that; he creates images that have some wizardry and some wonder, some daring and some power to astonish. But Whedon, for the most part, doesn’t dare touch Shakespeare, with one half-exception: he begins the movie with a strange and wordless bit of backstory, showing Benedick rising from Beatrice’s bed after an apparent one-night stand.

I call it a “half-exception” because it’s not a fabrication from scratch but an interpretation of a line in the play, when, in Act II, Scene 1, Beatrice explains herself to Don Pedro:

PEDRO: Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick.

BEATRICE: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it—a double heart for his single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice; therefore your Grace may well say I have lost it.

The phrase “false dice” is a sufficiently Shakespearean ribald double-entendre to suggest Whedon’s interpretation. It’s how I took the line when I first read the play, but then came to doubt it because of the text’s extreme emphasis on virginity as a prime feminine virtue. I now take the line to mean that Beatrice and Benedick had a brief romance, and that he broke it off because of his vow to never marry, because of his aversion to love and to enduring relationships. In other words, the cavalier Benedick trifled with Beatrice’s heart, led her to believe that he might requite her love for him, but then, fearing commitment, left her for someone else or for nothing but his freedom. This couple that has slept together once, the woman of intelligence and insight who is not a virgin, makes a fascinating contrast with the innocence of Hero, who has charm but little wit, and Claudio, who is so unworldly, naïve, and obtuse as to believe that his wife must be a virgin.

Would the seduction of Beatrice—or, rather, her sexual relationship with a man she loved, whom she thought loved her—be the cause of her tart-tongued temper? She surely would realize that, because she’s not a virgin, she wouldn’t be considered a fit match for any nobleman, for any man of her own station—except for Benedick, the one who caused her fall, her seducer, who is, however, the one man she wouldn’t have, taking him as a villain or, at least, holding him in contempt. Or does she not blame him utterly because she blames herself equally, and so, with the same gesture, taunts him and implicitly invites him?

There is one moment, later in the scene, that hints once more at the possibility:

BEATRICE: Good Lord, for alliance! Thus goes every one to the world but I, and I am sunburnt. I may sit in a corner and cry Heigh-ho for a husband.

PEDRO: Lady Beatrice, I will get you one.

BEATRICE: I would rather have one of your father’s getting. Hath your Grace ne’er a brother like you? Your father got excellent husbands, if a maid could come by them.

There’s only one brother of Don Pedro in the play: Don John, actually his half-brother, or bastard brother, the perpetual sneerer, malcontent, and, as it turns out, the play’s villain. Beatrice is suggesting that only a bastard would be apt for her—and also hinting at her yearning for the understanding and the mercy that would render her loss of virginity irrelevant to a prospective husband, and at the unjust inequality of judgment that pardons a man’s sexual dalliance but not a woman’s.

In short, Whedon’s interpretation brings much substance in its wake. It’s the most audacious thing that he does with the play, and for that alone, his movie would be worthy—if in fact he had (no pun intended) fleshed this insight out, called attention to its implications—not least, by adding dialogue of his own, by using images to emphasize his analysis. I love Shakespeare’s language too much to hear it tossed at me by the shovelful. It’s a misplaced gesture of reverence for Whedon to rely on Shakespeare (relatively) untouched—he does eliminate a key line from Benedick’s soliloquy at the end of Act II: “If I do not take pity of her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew.” I think that Christianity is at the core of the play, that the very definition of mercy is crucial to the story—and that’s why the quiet, reverent staging of the scene, near the end, in which Leonato, Hero’s father, abjures vengeance against Claudio and Don Pedro is the most moving scene in Whedon’s film.

Nonetheless, Whedon treats the play overall like a screenplay, like one that is his mandatory assignment as handed down by a producer; he does his job earnestly and dutifully. The most reverent thing to do with a movie adaptation of a work of literature is to approach it not like a translator but like an artist—or like a critic-turned-artist: emphasizing the specific source of greatness by the clear expression of one’s own point of view on the work in question. Pare down; emphasize; slow down; repeat; isolate; spotlight; add text; use title cards; include special effects; in short, engage the panoply of one’s own art to extract the essence, the spirit, of a work that one loves.

As it happens, I’ve been thinking recently about Goethe’s novel “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” published in 1795-96, which has a brilliantly specific scene regarding the question of adaptation—as it happens, of “Hamlet.” The novel is centered on a young bourgeois man, the title character, who joins a travelling theatre troupe. Young Wilhelm reveres Shakespeare and prevails upon the company’s director, Serlo, to mount a production of “Hamlet”:

Wilhelm had required that Hamlet should be played entire and unmutilated; the other had agreed to this strange stipulation, in so far as it was possible. On this point they had many a contest; for as to what was possible or not possible, and what parts of the piece could be omitted without mutilating it, the two were of very different opinions.

The story unfolds in Chapters Four and Five in the Fifth Book of the novel. In the contrast between the artist’s point of view and the impresario’s, Goethe sets up one of his most famous aphorisms:

But when Serlo talked of separating the wheat from the chaff, Wilhelm would not hear of it. “It is not chaff and wheat together,” said he: “It is a trunk with boughs, twigs, leaves, buds, blossoms and fruit. Is not the one there with the others, and by means of them?” To which Serlo would reply, that people did not bring a whole tree upon the table; that the artist was required to present his guests with silver apples in platters of silver.

But what happens is this: after spending a few days studying the play closely, Wilhelm emerges with a theory about the “external relations of the persons” in the play, meaning “the disturbances in Norway, the war with young Fortinbras, the embassy to his uncle,” and a variety of other background stories that would root the play in quasi-political events—and, as he undertakes his translation of “Hamlet” into German, he also reconfigures it to fit his own grand, world-historical vision. But the one thing he wouldn’t let Serlo do—and he unleashes quite the diatribe when the thing is proposed—is to “compress” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “into one.”

Goethe’s Shakespeare would be a work of art. So, of course, is Shakespeare’s Shakespeare—but an art that is, on the one hand, utterly inaccessible and lost to time (inasmuch as it was written for production under particular circumstances) and therefore in need of some transformative act of rediscovery, of recovery. And, on the other hand, Shakespeare’s Shakespeare is immediately accessible to everyone—the printed play—and therefore a commonplace, to the point of oblivion, that would have its wonder restored through a daringly imaginative, personal staging or filming. Then again, I consider the greatest film of all time to be a Shakespeare adaptation—Godard’s “King Lear”—one that sets the bar of imaginative interpretation awesomely high.

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